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After downloading and opening Coast, it will appear in your menu bar. Click the gauge icon and then click the settings slider (⊞) to open the dashboard. Enter your monthly spending, total invested, and monthly savings. Coast does the rest. Switch to Advanced mode later for a full breakdown of income, expenses, and assumptions.

Your FIRE number is the investment portfolio size that can sustain your lifestyle indefinitely. By default, Coast uses the 4% safe withdrawal rate, meaning your FIRE number is 25× your annual spending. If you spend $4,200/month ($50,400/year), your FIRE number is $1,260,000. You can override this with your own target in the dashboard.

Enter the value of investments that will fund your retirement withdrawals, typically index funds, ETFs, 401(k)/IRA balances, and brokerage accounts. Do not include home equity or illiquid assets here (those go in the "Illiquid assets" field in Advanced mode, displayed separately but excluded from FIRE calculations).

Open the dashboard (click the gauge → settings icon → scroll to Settings), then toggle "Launch at login." Coast uses macOS's native login item API, so no background helpers are needed.

Coast uses real (inflation-adjusted) returns: your nominal return minus inflation. It projects your portfolio forward month by month using: FV(n) = P×(1+r)ⁿ + PMT×((1+r)ⁿ−1)/r, where P is your current portfolio, PMT is monthly savings, and r is the monthly real rate. The freedom date is when FV(n) first equals or exceeds your FIRE number.

Coast tracks four targets simultaneously:

• Lean FIRE: 70% of current spending × 25. Freedom on a trimmed budget.
• Full FIRE: current spending × 25. The classic 4% rule.
• Fat FIRE: 1.5× current spending × 25. Live more, worry less.
• Coast FIRE: the amount you need invested today so compound growth alone reaches your Full FIRE number by your target retirement age, even if you stop saving entirely.

Coast defaults to 7% nominal return and 3% inflation (4% real return), a common long-term estimate for a diversified index fund portfolio. These are configurable in Settings → Assumptions. The exact values matter less than using them consistently over time.

The most common causes are: (1) entering a savings figure that doesn't account for all real spending, (2) including non-liquid assets (home equity, car) in "invested," or (3) mixing nominal and real return assumptions. Try Advanced mode, where entering income and expenses separately removes one common source of error.

Everything stays on your Mac. Settings and inputs are stored in UserDefaults, sandboxed to Coast. Sensitive figures use the macOS Keychain. Nothing is transmitted to any server. Coast has no network entitlements beyond the App Sandbox.

In stealth mode, the menu bar shows only the progress gauge. No percentage, no balance, no financial context. The full panel is locked until you authenticate with Touch ID, Apple Watch, or your Mac password. Useful when working in shared spaces.

When "Require Touch ID to reveal" is enabled, all monetary amounts are blurred with ●●●●. A single authentication reveals figures for that session. Locking your screen or switching users resets the session, and amounts hide again until the next authentication.

Yes. In the dashboard, scroll to the Data section and click "Export JSON." This produces a plain-text JSON file with all your inputs and settings, readable in any text editor and importable back into Coast on another Mac.

Coast is $9.99, one time. No subscription, no renewal. You get every feature included from day one, plus all future updates at no additional cost. There is a 30-day free trial with no account or payment required to try it.

A single license covers one Mac. If you need a second machine, you'll need a second license. Family or household pricing isn't available yet.

Every update we ship to Coast, new features, improvements, macOS compatibility updates, are all free for anyone who has purchased a license. You pay once and the app keeps getting better.

macOS can hide menu bar icons if the bar is crowded. Hold ⌘ and drag the Coast icon right (toward the clock). If it doesn't appear at all, try quitting and relaunching from Applications, or log out and back in after setting "Launch at login."

Coast needs at least one expense value to calculate your FIRE number. Open the dashboard and enter your monthly spending (Simple mode) or living expenses (Advanced mode). Once you have expenses and a valid withdrawal rate, your FIRE number and projection will appear.

Make sure "Require Touch ID to reveal" is enabled in Settings. If Touch ID fails, Coast automatically falls back to your Mac password. If your device has no Touch ID sensor, only the password path is available.